


Running the Asylum

by tennydaughter



Category: Constantine (2005), Supernatural
Genre: Consequences, Gen, Genius Loci, Teeth Clenched Teamwork, hunters v. exorcists
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-03
Updated: 2017-02-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 11:33:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6152311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tennydaughter/pseuds/tennydaughter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In retrospect, John ought to have seen it coming. You don't have an entire mental hospital taken over by demons as the site of a infernal-celestial battleground without drawing some attention.<br/>(Or, the Winchesters finally hit Los Angeles.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Exposition

John didn’t usually go back to places where he’d done exorcisms for at least three years. He kept track of these places with a map of the city tacked to a wall and pins stuck in it. Red for successes (twenty-eight), pink for failures (eighty). (Pink because John was a stubborn, petty bastard, and if he was going to lose he was going to be as small-minded as possible, damn it.) 

Because the thing about exorcisms was that they so frequently resulted in what to the naked, inexperienced eye looked like scenes of murder. Demons wreaked hell -- ha ha -- on the human world, like fat people trying to squeeze into a extra-small. They broke it just by being there. Even if the person who was possessed survived, there was always blood and fluids and excessive property damage. Safer for John to keep his distance and let time blur some of the evidence and some of the surveillance on a site before he went back -- if he had to go back at all. John honestly tried not to fuck up exorcisms; with most demons it was a one-time chance anyway.

Again, that was his usual practice. But now, less than six months after That Night, John stood in front of That Place and took a deep, unblackened breath, just to reassure himself.

Angela had called him. “Someone broke into the hospital last night,” she’d told him.

“So?” John had asked blankly. He’d been writing Psalms on the bottom of his shoes; the lumpy red ink had dripped globbily from his suspended stylus onto the Formica table. He’d had no idea what hospital Angela had meant; wondered why she would call him about some police thing like a B & E. (As opposed to a police thing like a demon feed or a botched possession. Angela had taken better than John had ever thought to ghostbusting.)

“John.” Angela always spoke his name firmly, almost like a commandment. As if she thought that if she didn’t keep the vowel short and pin down the consonant at the end, the slitheryness of that initial J would just slither the whole thing away from her. “I mean Ravenscar. ”

John had said nothing. He’d stared at ink on his left shoe. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, he had written, and begun the downstroke of the f. From whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.

It was a charm for travel; an incantation for safety in the night. John hadn’t slept much since Ravenscar and so he’d been doing even more of his business in the night hours than usual. He could only close his eyes once the sun had cleared the Santa Monicas.

Daylight was a false security, and could protect him against so little, really. But the darkness that hid the eyes and the bodies and the twisted wills of so many malicious, infectious demons that John knew were there had made nighttime into its own new world, one beyond the hideousness of Hell he knew so well and without the lightness and brightness of the Heaven that he had glimpsed. 

_He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep._

He felt weight on his own shoulders. The metaphysical weight of a night that began with punching the face off a Helldenizen; took a cheery ride through a crowd of the possessed; had an agonizing twist with the sudden angelic slap that had crushed Chas’ viscera to pulp; and in the end had involved a fallen angel, the Fallen angel, unholy demon spawn grinning through the skin of Angela’s womb, and God the Father Almighty. 

And Heaven, too, John’s one and only taste of pure water in a lifetime spent choking on the blood-red mud of Hell--

\-- a taste snatched right from his lips. By the God-damned Devil who had saved John’s goddamned life, and nothing was fair, nothing, not ever.

In other words. Weight. Who the fuck wanted to go back there? Not John, bet you anybody’s ass.

_The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand._

“Are you still there?” Angela had asked patiently. 

“Yeah,” John had grunted. He dipped the stylus into the ink and finished the f and said, “It got broken into. So what? People love to break into abandoned insane asylums. There’s probably even a blog or something.”

“People love to break into anything that’s got a chain and a padlock on it,” Angela had agreed. “But whoever it was who broke into the hospital, I think they were part of your scene.”

John had lifted his eyebrows.

“John?”

Dammit. He’d forgotten that telephones were phonic-only, not visual. Since Beeman and Hennessey had been murdered, and Chas had ascended or whatever-the-fuck, Angela was pretty much John’s only telephonic communication. He was rusty, he guessed.

“Didn’t know that I had my own scene, Angela.”

“I didn’t know that you knew about blogs.” She had almost laughed; Angela only ever almost laughed. “They left a mark on the door,” she went on. “On all the doors on the ground floor. Some kind of pentagram thing, with… sigils inside.”

“Kids these days. Playing with Satanism and Wicca and all that shit.” Luckily just the preschool version of Satanism, the morons. John, unimaginative at the best of times, refused to even try and picture a hormonal teenager with a finger on the power of the other realms.

“John, take this seriously.”

His silence that time was perfectly intentional.

“Just… why don’t you go by and see what they’re up to?” Angela had said.

“You do it,” John had suggested acidly. “You’re the cop.”

“I would, but I’m in Atherton at a law enforcement convention. The only reason I even know about the break-in is because I have one of my friends in uniform division keeping an eye on the place for me while I’m gone.”

Just while she was gone? Did that mean Angela had been keeping watch on the place on her own for the last six months? That thought had surprised John. Because, hello, Mammon in her womb, taking over her body entirely; almost killed by Satan and Gabriel, in that very building. Not to mention Isabel’s swan dive from the roof that had started the whole thing.

John hadn’t been able to tell if he was impressed, or just confused. Was it a female thing or more of a normal-human thing, this returning? Whichever, he’d thought with irritation, I’m shit at understanding either of them.

“You know, Angela, when I gave you my number I was not actually volunteering for deputy duty.”

“Yeah, well, until I can make some connections with another demon hunter in the greater Los Angeles area, you are my deputy,” she fired back. “Especially here. Especially with Ravenscar, John.”

His name, firm as a rock in her mouth. Not just because of what she wanted from him. But because, like Chas, Angela had actually trusted John Constantine that night. And now continued to trust him.

_The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night._

“Come on, John,” Angela pushed, “it’s not like we can just ignore it. What if something else is happening there?”

Funny, wasn’t it, what a girl’s expectations could drive a man to?

_Definitely… mostly not about the girl._

“Fine, Angela. I’ll go tomorrow morning.” It was nearly midnight now. Sometimes you wanted to find things, and that was when you ventured into the dark. But if he was going back to Ravenscar, where earth had been touched by Hell, then he was going there in broad daylight. At noon.

John wasn’t suicidal, anymore.

“Thanks, John.” Angela’s voice was warm. He could hear her smile, could picture it: the small, restrained, but all-honest curve of her lips. “Let me know how it goes, all right?” And she’d hung up before he could, leaving John half-annoyed and half-amused.

_The Lord shall preserve you from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul._

Now, John stood in front of Ravenscar, glaring up at it from across the street, leaning against Beeman’s old car, his own new ride. The old hospital loomed like a tombstone built for thousands. 

“Yeah, sure, Angela,” he muttered. “I’ll let you know how it goes. Assuming that I survive.”

_The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore._


	2. Investigation

The day was hot and quiet. The neighborhood around the hospital consisted mostly of dreary and only partially-tenanted office space: squat blank shapes that reeked of boredom and decades of aimless depression. It was one of those desolate no-mans-lands scattered like pocket universes throughout this city of millions: places somehow cut off from the beat of Los Angeles, lost in the hugeness of a metropolis. There was not another human in sight when John slipped through the gap in Ravenscar’s front gates.

In front of him the concrete façade reared up endlessly, pocked by the long slits of the barred windows, casting a shadow as big as a lake across the tarmac. The iron cross was still bolted to front; a joke just as sick as he remembered, in light of everything that had happened here. If the office buildings were bored and depressed, this block of concrete was aloof, impassive -- and yet somehow still angry. No one looking at it could ever doubt that it was a receptacle for pain, a thing meant to contain human misery.

John grimaced and went on.

He approached the hospital gingerly; there was a lot of empty parking lot between the gate and the building. He felt as small and exposed as a bug crawling across an enormous black table. The big black cross hung over him. Ravenscar. What kind of a name was that for a Catholic hospital? Shouldn’t it be named after Guadalupe or something?

Our Lady of the Antfarm. Our Lady of the Perpetual Suicides. Our Lady of the Devil’s Own Son. 

Good names for a nightclub. John would have to suggest them to Midnite, next time he saw him. He was sure that his wit would be appreciated.

Angela’s “friend in uniform division” had said that the broken-open door was on the western end of the building. They had been locked with a length of heavy-duty chain and the kind of padlock that you basically needed the Jaws of Life to cut through. 

The chain was coiled neatly on the ground; the padlock had been picked open. 

It took a sharp ram with his shoulder to knock the door open. Six months ago he had gone through them with Chas right behind him, the shotgun in one hand, and a pair of lungs coated with a terminal case of tar. Now he was alone, unarmed, and cancer-free. An angel and the Devil had done for his friend, his weapon, and his cancer. Who knew what would eventually do for John.

He hoped that it wasn’t going to be whoever had broken into Ravenscar. Who wants to die in the same place twice?

John palmed the door shut behind him, guarding against any rattle. A whiff of aerosol rose to his nose a moment before his eyes, adjusting to the even dimmer light inside, saw the slash of red paint. He stepped back.

A large circle lapped the doors, a nearly perfect circle. Someone’s had practice, John thought. An upright pentagram; bastardized Hebrew -- he didn’t read Hebrew, didn’t know the Lesser Key of Solomon by heart, but he damn well knew a binding spell when he saw one. The spray-painted lines were uniform and even; no easy feat, with aerosol. The genuine article, he thought, and then, shit.

Question: Why would anyone want to put a magical padlock on an empty building?

Answer: What makes you think it’s empty, Constantine?

+++

The air inside the hospital was dead and dry. Cold, like the air that mummified bodies in ice fields. The bodies of those dumb fucks who, deciding that the risks of sea level were not quite adequate, decided to give climbing Mount Everest a try and then failed miserably and in the most permanent of ways.

Above a certain elevation on Everest, John recalled tangentially as he moved through the empty white foyer, they couldn’t bring back a body. If a man fell, then he lay where he fell, whether the Sherpas were able to find him or not. It was called the Death Zone, because it killed people and because it was littered with the frozen, withered, preserved bodies of so many mountaineers who had proved to be more ambitious than capable.

John was not ambitious, but he hoped grimly that he was at least more capable, at this point, of surviving a Death Zone. 

It was winter in Los Angeles (inasmuch as the city ever truly experienced a season), and he had worn his trench coat with all the convenient inside pockets. There was a rosary under his shirt and a scripture written on every piece of his clothing. Yes, including his boxers. But he wished that he had the gun with him. With Chas gone, there was no one who could make the bullets for him. 

Well. No one who would make the bullets. Rumors of what had happened in Ravenscar had spread in the last six months through the underworld (my scene, John thought darkly, peering up a stairwell) and while John hadn’t been a popular guy before, his reputation was even worse now. He thought it must be like being a gangbanger who can barely buy a hooker because they’ve knifed so many other thugs. Regardless of Who or What he had stopped from destroying the world and turning it into Hell’s Disneyland, John was marked.

So the gun was back at his place, in a shoebox on the closet floor. He had his knives, though: three for the Trinity, each blade washed in holy water and blessed by a priest on the feast day of Michael the archangel. The saint of soldiers, the prince of warriors.

Plus the knuckles. Of course. They had worked so beautifully against Balthazar that John had nearly had them christened. Their heavy weight in his right-hand pocket was deeply reassuring.

Circling left, John passed four long, dark hallways that plunged away into the guts of the building. Memory led him to the fifth hall, and he peered down it to see a familiar pair of double doors waiting for him down at the end. Weak sunlight filtered through the rectangular holes where the broken glass had fallen through.

The weight of the trench coat was enormous. It really wasn’t cold enough to wear it, he realized, because he was suddenly drenched in sweat. 

He put one of the knives -- the biggest one -- in his hand, put his other hand on the lid of his flask of holy water, and walked quietly down the hallway, instinctively sticking to the left-hand wall. His shoes made small but audible noises as he walked. He thought of the psalm written on them, in ink made of wax and honey and the black blood of gallnuts. 

The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.

It was too dim for shadows inside of Ravenscar. Everything was gray and indistinct: the floor tiles, the angles where the wall and the ceiling met. John’s own skin -- never too lively a shade -- seemed sallower than ever.

As he got closer John could see through the empty windows in the door. And he saw the twisted shapes of a hundred human bodies littering the floor. A smell like hot meat and sulphur roiled towards him out of the broken windows, boiling into his nose and mouth. He gagged violently, hunching against the wall. 

As soon as he looked away, the smell vanished, though his body still felt the pang of his reflex, the primal throb of distress. Confused, John stared at the opposing wall. He willed himself to look again, to look again, LOOK--

The bodies and the stench and the presence of evil--

John slammed his eyes shut and the smell cut out, just like a channel being changed on television.

Eyes still closed, John crouched and leaned against the wall, breathing shallowly, pulse hammering as if he were climbing through the thin air of the Death Zone after all. He felt cold, but new sweat sprang up across his back and belly. 

He took the hand off of the flask of holy water and reached into his coat, fumbling through the pockets for a little glass bottle. The contents smelled faintly fragrant and oily: Rood-light oil, fuel from the lamp that burned in a church before the cross and the Blessed Sacrament. 

John wet his forefinger with the liquid and touched each of his closed eyelids. Then he opened them cautiously.

He saw the bottom of the doors, the crack of light between them and the floor.

Cautiously he straightened. He kept his gaze down, staring at the crack of light, until he stood fully upright. Then, with a kind of wrench, he brought it up and again looked through the broken windows. 

There was nothing in the room save for toppled furniture and settled shadow. The bodies were gone, the sight of them banished back to John’s memory.

But there was something. Something with a presence. Something with the smell of Hell that still writhed through the still, cold air of Ravenscar.

There was a puddle of congealed black ooze on the floor, beside a flimsy metal and plastic chair that was pulled up directly in front of the double doors. It was six months old, but the ooze looked like it had been deposited perhaps only a day earlier. It shone with the sickly iridescence of oil, but it looked depthless -- like a liquid hole in the world, not just a puddle of motor oil.

A razorblade of fear raced up John’s spine. “Pollution,” he whispered, and the sibilant hiss of his voice echoed off the walls around him.

+++

John went round to all the other doors, checking. Pentagrams on each one, inscribed and circled, to bind within. The paint was thick and bright, fresh. But when he looked closer he saw bubbles in the paint, tiny scrapes in the outside edges. Nothing that would compromise the seal, but it was evidence. Something in the building, scratching at its bindings. 

What if something else is happening there? Angela had asked. Angela; Angela the psychic but more, Angela the cop, Angela with the instincts, the intuition. He’d come because Angela had asked; he’d come because he knew that when all those Angelas had the same feeling, then there was probably something to it. Isabelle would never commit suicide.

The stench of Hell. The visions of hell on earth, come and gone six months ago. The black ooze, livid like a bruise. Fresh paint wearing thin.

There were things that -- things that you couldn’t see. Not until they turned and looked at you, or not until you turned and looked for them. He had been looking away, closing his eyes and patrolling every hotspot in the city except for this one -- because he could finally sleep at night. Because Hell no longer haunted him, no longer hung over his head, like a hand ready to snatch his soul down. No longer turned his sleep into suffering.

But he had not looked. He had not wanted to look, dammit, and now there was something in Ravenscar. Or perhaps there had been something in Ravenscar, even when he came back for Chas’ body, and he had closed his eyes and wished in his heart not to see, so he had not seen.

Fear had gotten him. He had given in to fear.

John cursed, rummaged in his pockets. No carton of cigarettes met his fingertips; only his lighter, kept by necessity for the lighting of candles and fires. He squeezed it in his hand, cursed again. His lungs throbbed, too small for his ribcage, pulling in the bones.

“Jesus Christ, John,” he said, disgusted with himself. “Get a grip. Get a grip.”

Something moved.

He dropped the lighter in his pocket, traded it for the knuckles. Knife in left hand. Wished he had the gun. He was by one of the doors, but it was still chained shut from the outside. He could circle around; if he kept his back to the wall, kept moving, he could get back to the open door and get back to the sunlight. Not to safety -- that was a word that John was no longer allowing himself to think. he swapped again, his knuckles for the bottle of holy water.

But what stepped forward out of the dimness of one of the dim hallways was not an abomination of the Pit, not a half-breed creature of sin and darkness. 

It was human. A man -- no, a kid, young but tall. Broad shoulders and long hair that curled over his ears. A bulky tan jacket that screamed Midwest. Jeans, work boots. Some kind of book in one hand. 

And a gun in the other.


	3. Intimidation

_So I’m not going to die by demon,_ John thought as the gun in the boy’s hand swung up. _I’m going to be murdered by a Sasquatch instead._

He didn’t have a second. His hand was already in his pocket. The brass knuckles were a smooth gilt weight. 

He hurled them at the boy in a blur of gold. The boy dodged to the side, caught by surprise. The mouth of the gun never moved from John’s center of gravity, but the kid wasn’t watching him anymore. John took two swift steps and as the brass knuckles fell to the linoleum with a ringing clatter he seized the boy’s right wrist in his left hand and brought his right fist swinging up towards his face.

The boy saw it coming, moved, failed to move fast enough. John’s blow caught him on the chin and he grunted and staggered. But up close the kid was even bigger and about as solid as a log, and the blow didn’t faze him for long. John deflected an elbow to his neck, moved his feet out of stomping range. It was an awkward shuffling dance, the two of them joined by John’s octopus grip on the gun hand.

“Omni immundus spiritus,” the kid chanted, in a young, rough, unleavened baritone, “omnis satanica potestas--”

Rite of Rome. Rite of Rome. An exorcist?

John chimed in at a shout. “Omnia incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, omnis congregatio--“

The kid stuttered off into confusion. He reached for John’s face with his free hand, fingers crawling after John’s eyes. John jerked back.

“Christo,” he spat.

And there -- the kid’s arms slackened, broad face awash in uncertainty, eyes saying What is going on--

John wrapped his leg behind one booted foot, got a hand on that thick neck, and pushed. The boy crashed back like a felled tree, his skull cracking gently against the ground, which was linoleum over concrete.

John knelt on his chest, took a second to wrench the gun out of his loosened grip. It was a pistol and it was chambered, that’s all that John could tell, and he thanked You Know Who -- all right, he thanked God -- for something of an answered prayer. It was no shotgun, but it was a projectile weapon and that was all he needed to take on a human.

He put the barrel up against the fold of flesh beneath the boy’s throat. This was maybe over-aggressive, considering the Roman Rite and what that implied. But the kid did try to shoot John first, so. And it got him to lie quietly, hands up by his head.

John was suddenly so attached to his life, now that he’d gotten it back.

“Are you an exorcist?” John hissed.

The boy’s ribcage expanded and deflated against John’s knees like a bellows. Shit, Sasquatch was incredibly accurate, this kid was going to be huge. He blinked, head still obviously ringing from the impact with the floor, and focused dark eyes on John. “I’m a hunter.”

“Yeah, I guessed that from the duds, pal,” John said. “And that haircut. Trucker-hat custom. Just what the hell kind of thing would you be hunting in here?”

“Look,” the kids said, very very calmly, “look. I’m sorry about--” he gestured gently with one finger towards the gun pressed against his throat. “--that. It was a mistake. I thought that you were some--”

“You thought I was a demon,” John said. “But hey. Christo. Name of God on my lips. So I’m not. So what I want to know is what brought you in here?”

The boy swallowed against the steel. “It’s hard to explain when you’re sitting on my lungs,” he pointed out, reasonably enough. Indeed, he sounded slightly breathless. Also as though this was not the first time he had been held down at gunpoint. That was interesting. “Let me up and I’ll tell you.”

John considered. He didn’t really want to surrender the upper hand. But what was the point in keeping a human kid pinned to the floor if he wasn’t the real problem?

Besides. If Ravenscar had pulled in some out-of-towner who had the Roman Rite memorized, something was definitely going on. John needed to figure out what. This seemed like a better starting point than wandering around having satanic hallucinations.

“Fine,” he said. He pulled away the gun, lifted it into sight. “I think I’ll hang on to this, though, you know?”

The kid grimaced but looked resigned. He gave a jerky little nod. As if John were actually asking for his agreement. How sweet.

John rocked off his knees back onto the balls of his feet, lifted himself off the kid’s chest and packed up a few paces. Slowly, the kid rolled up to sitting and then gathered his long legs under him, coltish and almost comical, what with the shaggy hair and the baggy jacket. 

As soon as he was standing he cast his head around, searching for something -- for the book he’d had in his hand. It had flown across the hall during the fight and fetched up against the wall by the door painted with the Seal. He crossed over to it and picked it up, moving slowly, probably fighting dizziness from blow to the head. 

John pointed to the red paint on the door. “That was you?”

“Yeah.”

“Last night?”

“No. This morning.”

“That’s not right,” John argued. “The chains have been off the doors since last night, I have it on good authority.”

“Yeah,” said the kid. “And we sealed the doors then. But that one,” he pointed to the red Seal behind him, “that one I just painted, maybe an hour ago.”

“What? Why?”

The kid shifted, shrugged. “The first one was gone.” He lifted his hands, twiddled his fingers. “It’s like it…dissolved.”

“Dissolved,” John repeated. He looked at the Seal, saw the slight bubbled distortions in the red paint, and the thought again bubbled up to the top of his mind. Pollution.

“Shit,” he said out loud. 

“What do you know?” the kid asked, low and intense.

John looked at him. “Not much,” he said. “But I’ve got a feeling.”

God, he thought, I would kill for a cigarette. A sensation like pin-clawed lizards was racing up and down his spine. It felt hard to breathe; he parted his lips to drag air down into his (pink and clean and wide, wide-open) lungs.

“Wait,” he said sharply. “You said we.”

“My brother and I,” said the kid, and then there came down the long echoing hallways the sound of a door slamming shut.

+++

The door slammed behind him and a string of curses immediately sprang to Dean’s mind. But he felt resigned, in a way. Monsters and creatures were one thing: that was a true hunt, woods and open spaces. Wandering around in abandoned mental hospitals was another. Of course something like this would happen. Why had he and Sam split up, again? He needed to take a lesson from Scooby-Doo: split up and somebody falls through a trapdoor. Come on, Dean.

The room he had wandered into was empty, aside from some tables and chairs and a puddle of inky blackness that had turned the EMF into a tiny portable Christmas tree and smelled like… like things Dean didn’t have words for, things you could only feel and not describe. Smelled oily and sweet and fecund, like mold in a motel sink. Only not, only… worse. And it was warm, too, giving off a faint moist heat when he put his hand down near it. Which was when the door had slammed and the handle locked up.

So he was cut off there. Dean turned to survey the room again. It was windowless and dark, but on the far side there was a doorway, wide enough for double doors, letting in faint light that Dean used to pick his way across. He’d have used the flashlight but he was carrying the shotgun, a heavy cool weight that centered him. Sam had figured that it was a spirit haunting the hospital, some enraged post-patient gone posthumously poltergeist, so Dean had loaded up on rock salt. His pockets hung heavy with extra cartridges.

That black shit by the door, though. No way a little rock salt was going to take care of that.

The light was coming from above: a skylight, empty of glass, over a shallow and befouled pool. Shards of glass glinted on the concrete bottom. There were things that looked like blackened feathers wallowing in the corners with other kinds of scum. What, did a seagull die in there? Dean sniffed delicately. He smelled water and dust, but no rot.

He stayed back from the edge of the pool. Something about it made his skin crawl.

+++ 

The door that had slammed was locked.

“Dean’s in there,” the kid said, voice a pitch lower and frenetic. “I need to get inside.” He looked up and down the hallway. “Is there another door?”

“No,” John said curtly.

John rummaged in his pocket. Matchbook, lighter, a tangle of talismans, card deck, knife, notebook, pen, lint. He swapped the handgun into his other hand and delved into the other pocket. Lint, knife, flask and -- yes.

He pulled out the charm, fingerbone of a thief carved into a slender arrow-point on one end and an elaborate pattern of sigils on the other. He warmed it in his hand. 

“What’s that?” asked the kid.

Before John could answer there was a loud spitting BANG from beyond the door. The kid grabbed the door handle and shouted. “Dean!”

John muscled him aside and jammed the arrow of bone into the spilt between the doors. “Do you have a flashlight?”

The boy fumbled one out from his deer hunter’s jacket. “Why--”

John snatched it out of his hand and with one thumb spun the cap on the vial of rood-light oil. He spattered oil thickly on the glass lens. 

“These doors will open. Do not go in. Just turn that on, and keep the light pointing straight forward.” The bone in his palm warmed against the skin. “Understand?”

He nodded, dark eyes wide and wild but lifting the flashlight up into position, and John thought passingly of Chas and of Angela. People who followed his orders in this dark-lit version of the world; and one dead (or gone), the other something hollowed out by horror but resolute and watchful, and she the one who had sent John to this place--

Definitely mostly not about the girl--

BANG. The boy flinched desperately.

John stepped back from the doors and said one very old word. The thief’s bone wobbled and twisted and a sharp crack sundered the doors apart. 

The flashlight beam dove forward into darkness. John saw the black footprints of Lucifer throwing back a scrim of light from near the door; he saw lumpen human shapes on the floor, heaving and roiling. Only where the anointed flashlight beam fell did he see the clear linoleum, a circle of light darting uncertainly around. Then the kid pointed it up, towards the back of the room, towards the pool.

The pool.

The water boiled. Or it seemed to. Something about that was not quite right, but it was too far away, the flashlight beam too yellow, and John could not see clearly enough. But there was a man, standing back from the lip of the pool, a shotgun in his hands trained downwards into the water.

“DEAN!” shouted the boy, and the man turned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So when I was writing this chapter I was looking up the boys’ guns on the Internet Movie Firearms Database (yeah, as awesome as it sounds) and then I ended up just scrolling past all the Season One stills going, “So young, so young!”


	4. Inundation

“DEAN!” Sam shouted, and his brother turned, framed in the faint light emanating from far across the room. But there was something very wrong with his face, his shape. There was a smell of burnt hair and sulphur. 

The sallow-skinned man beside Sam seized his fist and trained the flashlight beam on Dean’s warped figure. As the light swung across his brother’s figure Sam saw Dean in the light, and something else in the darkness. It hurt; the impression of wrongness was in his eyes and his mouth and pounding behind the front of his skull in a steady two-beat that drained into his chest. It was more than sight and it hurt.

“Keep it together, Sasquatch,” the man said. His voice was deep and flat and with the edge of a smoker’s rasp. He drew a long knife from the depths of his long jacket. He pointed its tip at Sam. He was tall, Sam realized, able to look directly into Sam’s own face. “You _stay,”_ he ordered, “and keep that flashlight _up,”_ and then he darted into the room, coat flapping. 

Sam flinched, expecting the things that covered the floor to reach up and snatch him, to overcome him in some hideous zombie wave. The rotten reek in the air intensified. But the man plowed over them, apparently unhindered by the black shapes. And as Sam watched he could see it, perceive some inexplicable difference between the movement of the man and theirs. They had the feel of dream things, the heavy nightmare masses that covered your face to smother you but only until you woke. 

There was another gunshot; Sam jerked his gaze back to the weird bifurcated Dean/not-Dean. He’d have had to reload to take that shot. What was in the pool that needed to die?

The oil that the strange man had smeared on the lens was beginning to spit and crackle from the light of the bulb. A wisp of steam appeared. Sam didn’t know what the oil was actually doing, but that seemed bad. “Hurry!” he shouted into the roiling gloom.

The man was at the far door, one shoulder silhouetted in the beam’s circle, his coat showing up pale and clean in the light but crawling with filth elsewhere. There was a flicker of metal in his right hand, and Dean seemed to flinch. Then Sam heard a shape of his brother’s voice, mangled beyond words into mere sound, as if Sam stood at a great distance from the other two, and saw him beckon with one arm.

The bodies on the floor began to heave.

+++

If the smell from the hall had been bad, running through the room was hellish. And John, after all, would know. He made that connection with no overstatement: Hell twisted and warped what came there; the brimstone wasn’t something that you were in, it was something that went into you. This place was like that -- not as twisted-ugly as the real thing, maybe, but bent enough that John could feel every holy, blessed or sacred object he had on his person flare against his skin like a blossom of frost, resisting the taint. Every blood cell in John’s body turned into a clenched fist. He chanted aloud and the air beat at his voice, at the words of the psalm for safety. The walls of the room seemed to shiver and the air was filled with a tinny buzzing roar.

John kept the light of the flashlight on his right. He could feel it on his arm, the warmth of a holy light. Under his feet there was slickness and stench, putrid flesh and black blood. The smell was everywhere like a hot breath. It wanted him to slip, to swallow him. His body rotting in this place where Chas died. But the psalm carved and painted into the soles of his shoes gave him a traction that even cleats couldn’t have accomplished, and John forged ahead, focusing on the dim square of light from the door to the pool room, using the flashlight beam to guide him there like a rope.

He saw the figure of the other man, still looking at the pool, gun still turned towards the water. There was a fat _blam,_ and the air around John slammed in reaction to the gunshot. 

A faint call from the doorway behind him, metaphysical warping turning what had to be a shout into a bare whisper. Whatever it was about, definitely nothing good.

John was close enough. The silver flask of holy water was icy in his grip as he yanked it out of a pocket, spun the cap, and splattered its contents in the face of the man the boy had called Dean.

The taint of the room made it a less definitive diagnosis than he’d have preferred, but although Dean flinched and spat a curse, he didn’t start to steam and smoke. And it was a solidly blasphemous curse: so, not a demon. John hadn’t crossed a hellhole to rescue one of its denizens. Wonderful. 

“Come this way!” he shouted through the darkness that stole from the words and made them small and tinny. He pointed with the knife. “Your brother is holding the light! Your _brother!”_

Dean seemed torn for a split second: he stepped in the direction of the light but swayed back towards the water, lifting his gun. Seeking the other man’s target, John turned and looked at the pool for the first time.

John had been seeing Devil-demons and human ghosts since he was seven. He had caught cannibalistic ghouls in the act, and disemboweled hideous unnatural creatures of summoning, and killed six witches with one knife in one night. He had sent his soul through Hell. 

He had never seen anything like what was in that pool.

The water heaved -- no, it _beat._ It contracted and expanded, a huge rhythm surrounded by a thousand tiny pulsations. The water was a shivering skin over a huge black heart. The slick organ was webbed into the concrete bottom of the pool with filaments of purple veins and capillaries bigger than John’s thigh, engorged with blood so hot that it boiled the water --

_Angela was in the water, her white shirt drowning around her--_

From the doorway, Sam shouted again. The light of the beam was weaker, a mere halo brushing against them. Something was wrong with the oil; they had to go.

 _It’s a heart,_ John thought with the mental equivalent of gritted teeth, _not a hand -- no fingers to hold us here, I ran before--_

He forcibly turned Dean, who was as locked-up as John had been. The other man gasped and hoisted the shotgun so that the tip was down-pointed and the butt snugged against his hip, and they ran across darkness back to where Sam stood in a dim aureole that was the light of the doorway.

It took ages and the heartbeat -- _the heartbeat_ \-- followed them.

+++

Dean and the man in the coat fell through, and Sam threw himself against one door, and then the other, and then he dropped the flashlight and seized his brother’s jacket in one hand, hauled him up to his feet, and propelled them both down the hallway. After a few steps Dean was had his feet back under him, and Sam got him around the corner of the next hall and Dean nodded at him, and so then Sam went back for the man in the long coat.

He was already standing and moving. He had a hand against the wall and his pale face was covered in sweat and a look like he’d just seen Hell, but he moved. Sam gave him the same treatment as Dean, practically pushing him on with hand fisted in the back of his long tan coat. At the end of the hallway behind them the doors were closed, but beyond them something palpably strained. Sam felt his whole body crawling.

Going around the corner felt like dropping into a trench during a storm, the wind blowing above you and past you. The man shook him off with a wordless snarl. Sam let him go and went to his brother, whose eyes were wide as a spooked horse’s, whose grip on the shotgun was white-knuckled.

“What the _hell_ \--” Dean began. Before he could say any more the man in the long coat pulled a flask from a pocket, spun the top open and splashed Dean in the face.

 _“Hey!”_ Sam and Dean yelled at the same time. Sam jerked, going for his weapon, and remembered with a sickening lurch that this man held his gun.

“Say Christo,” demanded the man.

“What--“ Dean scowled. “Christo. God. Holy shit, what was that in there?”

The man leaned back against the wall and screwed the cap back on his flask with slow movements of his thumb. His eyes were half-shut, looking past the yellowish wall he faced. 

“Something really bad,” he said.

“Wow, that’s helpful,” Dean snarled. “Do you have anything more useful to contribute?”

The man cut Dean a glance, flat and dark. Remarkably quickly, the tension that had reamed his face when he came around the corner receded behind a blank expression, though his dark eyes were black with adrenaline. “I already saved your life,” he said.  
“Though I guess the usefulness of that depends on the usefulness of you.”

“And just who the hell are you?” Dean asked. He shifted his grip on the shotgun and it took little imagination for Sam to realize that it was so that he could if necessary -- or even if not -- crack this stranger across his pasty face. 

The silver flask disappeared back into a pocket of the trench coat. “You first,” the man said, one eyebrow cocked in sardonic expectation. “Seeing as how I saved you and all.”

Dean opened his mouth, and Sam quickly clamped a hand down on his shoulder. “My name is Sam Winchester,” he said. “This is my brother, Dean. We’re hunters.”

 _“Hunters,”_ said the man. “Huh. Hunters. Not of the rare Los Angeles jackelope, surely?”  
“Hunters of monsters,” Dean cut in. “Asshole,” he added with relish. He didn’t miss but completely ignored Sam’s brief annoyed glare. “Your turn, buttercup.”  


“Constantine,” he said. “John Constantine.”  


There was a silence.  


_“And?”_ demanded Dean, aggrieved.  


“And I’m a Libra,” said Constantine. “Born under Mercury’s retrograde, unfortunately. Explains a lot.” He was digging in his coat, searching through pocket after pocket.  


“I don’t know why you think that being a smartass with us is a good idea,” Dean began, gesturing threateningly with the shotgun. The shotgun loaded with _rock salt,_ Sam thought, hardly a manstopper. This guy, it would probably just piss him off. Who knew what he had in that coat--  


From one pocket emerged a handgun. _Sam’s_ handgun. Incredulous, Dean wheeled on his little brother. Sam gave him a look that he knew was hung up on the fence between sheepish and defensive.  


Constantine gave the gun a little wave. “I’m liking this piece of yours,” he said casually. “Think I’m going to hang onto it for a little while longer. Is that okay with you, Sasquatch?” He paused. “I’m sorry. Is that okay, Sam?”  


Sam grimaced.  


Constantine looked at Dean. “I am an exorcist,” he said. “This is no hunt. Not a whole lot of wildlife left in Los Angeles. Demons, though: them we have plenty of. What you saw in that pool was…”  


“Was what?” Sam demanded when Constantine hesitated.  


Constantine’s non-expression darkened. “It was something from Hell,” he said.  


“That doesn’t sound like a turn of phrase,” Sam said. He could still smell the stink from the room around the corner, see the twisted thing that had seemed to stand where Dean had stood.  


“No,” said Constantine. “It is very literal. What you saw was demonic. So you see, Sam and Dean Winchester, this doesn’t call for any kind of hunt. I need to do an exorcism.”  


The lights flickered and dimmed, dropping them all into darkness.


	5. Foundation

“Crap,” Dean breathed, and instinctively grabbed Sam with the hand not holding the shotgun. Far down the hall a slim rectangle of weak light shone around a corner, but where they stood was in almost-total darkness. Dean could suddenly hear the blood marching in his ears.

“What’s happening?” Sam said tightly. 

“It’s been listening,” said Constantine. His voice was deeper in the darkness. “It heard me. Sam, the flashlight.” 

Dean heard the rustle of Sam’s jacket and a click, and a warm yellow pool of light appeared on the tile. “Sammy,” he said, low, and passed him the pearl-handled pistol that had been tucked into the back of his jeans. 

“We need to move,” Dean said, and started off down the hall. Sam fell into step behind his right shoulder, aiming the flashlight forward. The way was littered with chairs, desks, a wheelchair or two, and more file boxes than Dean could count. Dean didn’t care if Constantine followed or not, but he could hear the swish of his long jacket.

“That flashlight is covered in rood-light oil,” Constantine said. “It shows the truth of this plane. It cuts through illusions.”

“Illusion? Give me a break,” Dean snarled. “There was a heart the size of a killer whale in that pool!”

“A heart?” Sam asked, bewildered. 

“Ah, gross overstatement. You really _must_ be a hunter,” Constantine said. “But you’re right. The heart is here, in the building with us. But everything else that was in that room was like a memory -- an illusion.”

“Whose memory?” asked Sam.

“Probably mine,” Constantine said blandly. As if, Dean thought sourly, that wasn’t alarming in so many ways. Who _was_ this guy?

“So you’ve been here before?” Sam pressed him.

“Me,” said Constantine. “And other things. That’s the memory.”

Dean was distracted from his comeback by the sudden wave of stench that swept over them from behind: warm decay, moist dirt. Like a Florida graveyard in summer. Behind him Sam made an audible sound of disgust. Dean swallowed, and the smell slid down his throat like a spoonful of oil. He coughed.

A resonant, metallic crash: like a pair of double doors slamming open.

“Move faster,” Constantine ordered, and Dean didn’t bitch even in his head but did as the other man said. 

The narrow hallway felt cold and subterranean. They were nearing the corner ahead, getting closer to the natural light from the outside doors, and Dean was starting to think they would make it when Constantine snarled something in Latin. 

Dean turned, saw Sam turning too and, beyond his brother, a movement in the darkness. No, it was the darkness itself that was moving: roiling, quivering, shivering around a few central points. Shapes began to bulge out of the darkness, nightmarishly indistinct, lumps the size of a loaf of bread. They sprouted short legs tipped in claws, and lumpen heads with pointed noses and rounded ears. Sam darted the beam of the flashlight around but none of it disappeared, it was all real. A low undulating moan came from the walls all around them and every hair on Dean’s body stood straight up. Sam made a guttural noise.

“What--” began Sam, and suddenly the moving darkness was covered with eyes -- gleaming points of darkness in the greater dark. 

_“Run,_ said Constantine.

The shapes surged forward in a wave and in that moment Dean saw the tails and realized that they were things like rats. All three of them turned to run in one movement. Constantine was surprisingly fast, sprinting ahead; Dean dodged the detritus that clogged the halls with less speed, always listening to make sure Sam’s heavy steps followed close behind him. His brother cried out, and Dean stopped dead and turned, rifle swinging up. Sam had been less agile and had clipped a filing cabinet and stumbled, but he was up and moving again by the time Dean had the barrel pointed towards the rat-thing-swarm. 

“Go, Sam!” Dean shouted, and his brother flew past him. He squeezed off a shot and immediately knew it was a mistake. The horde squealed, many bodies making the noise of one creature, and the eyes became brighter and there was no way Dean was going to be able to outrun--

“Deus salvator meus!” Constantine appeared beside Dean, holding up not the gun he’d taken off Sam but a small circular pendant, a golden chain trailing from his fist. It shone too brightly for the half-light of the hallway. 

“Securus sum et intrepidus,” Constantine continued, the Latin rolling easily from his tongue as it did from Sam’s, from their father’s. “Dominus animi mea et robur, et factus est salvator meus!”

The headlong rush of the rat-things stopped and the darkness of them seemed to go down to its haunches, about four feet from where Dean stood. 

Then it began to change again, beady red eyes winking out as their bodies were pulled back into the mass, that mass stretching and elongating upwards, developing hips and shoulders, a neck…

“Let’s go,” barked Constantine, and grabbed Dean’s shoulder, and they moved towards the light.

Neither of them saw the newly-formed creature step forward, away from the main mass. It approached the spot where the men had stood; it extended one arm to a spot on the metal cabinet that Sam had fallen against. Its fingertips came back wet. It touched its fingers to a mottled tongue.

+++

The three of them spilled into the parking lot like kids fleeing school. One of the two “hunters,” the shorter one, Dean, actually tripped on one of the steps and nearly fell. Despite that he did not lose his grip on the sawed-off shotgun in his hand. 

John had never been so glad to see daylight in -- well. Actually he was glad to see daylight pretty often; the demonical hordes were weakened by pure light and he had used that to his advantage in the past. When possible, always try to exorcise by daylight: that he had learned. 

How, he wondered, was he supposed to exorcise an entire building?

They had come out of the western door; around them the empty office blocks were reassuringly silent and soulless. Beeman’s old car was nowhere in sight, parked around the other side of the building, but he saw an older model black sedan across the lot near the fence. He assumed it belonged to the Disastrous Duo.

“Let me see,” he heard Dean say, and looked to see Sam lifting a hand. Blood smeared down from the gash across the back of his hand, enough of it to paint the skin of his fingers red.

“It’s fine,” Sam said, “I just scraped it. I’ll get it at the car.” He looked from his brother over to John. “You said you’ve been here before.”

“Yeah.” In his pocket John rolled his lighter between two fingertips.

“Was it like that last time?” 

“No. Something’s changed.” John thought of the black puddle on the floor in the pool room, the visions that he had had there and then the weird warphole that had trapped Dean. His brain and his instincts and his fears were grappling with each other, turning and turning, trying to figure out what could explain those three things.

Dean was gazing uneasily at the door they’d left hanging open: a tiny black puncture in the steep concrete façade. “Will it follow us out?”

“I think if it could have, it would have,” John said. “I’d say it can’t go outside.” Demons were like hunting dogs set on prey: they didn’t just stop chasing. Maybe it was just the daylight that protected them -- or, now that John thought about it, maybe there was something about the footprint of the building itself that both drew and limited power. It would explain why it was the site of not one but now two vast demonic events. Like a nature reserve for the hellish.

And didn’t _that_ thought make John’s skin crawl.

He needed to call Angela. Whatever was happening here, she was a part of it. She wasn't as defenseless against the demonic as she had been six months ago, but-

“We still gotta lock that door ‘til we figure out what’s going on and what we’re going to do about it,” Dean said. “Sammy, get the chain and the paint from the car. We’ll put a seal on the outside too.”

“Right,” Sam said, and took off. But not towards the black sedan by the fence.

“Wait,” he said sharply, and pointed. “That’s not your car?”

Dean followed his finger. His face tightened when he spotted the car. “No,” he said grimly.

“Shit,” muttered John, and strode across the parking lot. He heard Dean and Sam both hustling along behind him, and for a moment he had to bite back the urge to snap _Wait in the car, Chaz!_ He wished these two _hunters_ weren’t here to get in his way. It was as though two strangers had climbed through his living room window and sat on the couch and demanded tea and cookies. Their presence at Ravenscar felt intrusive, unwelcome. This was John's history, John's nightmare, John's second chance.

Their shadows glided over the tinted windows. John leaned in and cupped his eyes around his hands to make out the interior. Beat-up fabric seats covered in a light layer of dirty sweatshirts and used notebooks; a crocheted blue-and-white blanket; a half-empty water bottle in each of the front two cup holders. An unplugged cord trailed from the iPod adapter slotted into the tape deck. Somebody young. Somebody probably foolish enough to break into an abandoned mental hospital. _People love to break into anything that’s got a chain and a padlock on it._

He stepped away and his hands left smudges in the dust that had coated the window. This car had been sitting here for more than a couple days, then. 

“When did you first break in?” he asked Sam.

“Last night,” Sam answered, looking perplexed. 

“And that’s when you first painted the seals on the doors?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I’d found some blogs that mentioned Ravenscar being haunted, or, uh, one of them called it a hellhole. Weird noises and screams at night. Sometimes lights in the windows. But no one ever out or in. Standard haunted hospital stuff.”

“Do you know if anyone ever went in?” John said. _Of course some idiot blogged about it,_ he thought. Didn’t anyone ever have enough sense to leave what was dangerous _alone?_

Sam shook his head, understanding dawning on his face. “No. People just started talking about it like, six months ago.”

Six months ago John had been dying of cancer. Six months ago Isabelle died. Six months ago Gabriel fell.

“You think that whoever’s car this is…” Sam trailed off, clearly wanting someone else to deliver the bad news.

“They’re inside Ravenscar,” Dean finished grimly.


End file.
